The Virtualization Room

Last week’s announcement by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard that they had entered in to a $250 million partnership was light on specifics, but at least one IT manager has an opinion of how the two companies should focus their engineering efforts.

“My biggest thing is man, just get me off of two consoles,” said Matt Lavallee, director of technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc. in Shrewsbury, Mass.

As it stands, Lavallee, who runs Microsoft Hyper-V on HP servers, relies on both HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) for information about the physical servers themselves, and Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for OS- and application-level monitoring.

In his opinion, that’s one console too many. Take managing alerts. “We probably manage 600 alerts in Operations Manager, and another 50 or 60 in SIM. It’d be great to manage alerts in one place, especially since so many of them are related,” he said.

Not having a single pane of glass is especially annoying in a virtual environment, where “physical doesn’t really matter anymore, even though at some level it still does,” Lavallee said. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could look at both layers together?”

Of the two consoles, Lavallee prefers HP SIM because it is cross-platform and Web-based. At the same time, there are many more plug-ins from third-party application vendors for Operations Manager. Thus, Lavallee’s idea is for engineers to take “the pipeline of data from Ops Manager and send it through to [the SIM] pane of glass.”

Lavallee puts the SIM/SCOM integration “on the better side of probable,” hopefully sooner rather than later. “If we don’t start to see things in the next six months, people like me are going to start calling it vaporware.”

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